Black Gate

The January/February issue of F&SF is all about the planet Mars — starting with a great cover, titled “Martian Vortex,” by Bob Eggleton. Here’s editor C.C. Finley:

Usually we start with a story and commission a cover for it but when Bob Eggleton sent us the Martian landscape that adorns this issue, we snatched up the illustration and went looking for stories to match. In the end, we found you not one, but three, all of them very different in tone and focus.

The Three Tales of Mars promised on the cover are by Gregory Benford, Alex Irvine, and Mary Robinette Kowal. The issue also includes stores by Alex Irvine, David Gerrold, Matthew Hughes, Terry Bisson, Albert E. Cowdrey and others.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

NOVELETS

• “Number Nine Moon” – Alex Irvine
• “The White Piano” – David Gerrold
• “Telltale” – Matthew Hughes

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The tenth issue of the online-only Fantasy Scroll Magazine, cover dated December 2015, is now available. In his editorial Iulian Ionescu’s celebrates the release of their Year One anthology, Dragons, Droids and Doom, and points out that in Year Two Fantasy Scroll published 55 short stories from 53 authors, totaling 181,000 words of fiction.

Iulian also provides his usual sneak peek of the contents of the issue. Here’s a snippet:

We start with “The Genie and the Inquisitor,” a new and fresh take on the genie myth by Johnny Compton, partly funny and partly horrific, but definitely bone-chilling. “The Hummingbird Air” by Paul Roberge is next, a fantasy story that follows the path of a boy and his growth into a man, ready to deliver a life-long awaited revenge.

Next is “The Empty Faux-Historical Residential Unit” by Rachel Hochberg, a science fiction story that takes place in a future dominated by robots, but brings us back into an old-fashion London scene. Jeremy Szal delights us in his epic fantasy story “Last Age of Kings”; there’s a lot of bloody action in this story, but also depth of character, all happening in an interesting setting.

“Kara’s Ares” is another science fiction story, by Clint Spivey, who follows the struggle of a mission to Mars and its aftermath. For some comic relief, we follow with “Protecting Nessie” by Hank Quense, who tells the story of three sisters with magical powers, fighting hard to defend the pet of their queen. “Dancing an Elegy, His Own” by Julie Novakova is next — a science fiction story that focuses more on the relationship between characters than on the setting, creating an emotionally loaded atmosphere, and closing with an unexpected twist.

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